Lattice-Boltzmann Simulations of Colloidal Particles at Fluid Interfaces

Particle-stabilized fluid interfaces are very common in industrial applications as they can be found for example in the food, cosmetics, or oil industries. However, until recently our understanding of these systems was mostly based on experiments, highly simplified theoretical calculations and only very few numerical approaches. The lack of well established and widely applied simulation codes is not surprising since computer simulations of particle stabilized fluid interfaces are a highy complex task. Suitable algorithms need to be able to treat the hydrodynamics of the involved solvents, the dynamics of the suspended colloidal particles, as well as the interactions between all those constituents at the same time. Furthermore, the simulation of large scale 3D emulsions requires highly efficient and massively parallel implementations and access to state of the art supercomputers. In these lecture notes we summarize the relevant details of our own simulation method for particle stabilized interfaces which is based on a combined Lattice-Boltzmann and molecular dynamics solver. We provide an overview on important implementation details and review a number of recent applications from our group with the aim to demonstrate the specific features of particle stabilized fluid interfaces.